Fortifying a future

At last, the Giants showed some guts — and some brains directly attached to those newly fortified intestines.

It’s not the $126 million for Barry Zito that makes such an impression. It’s the seventh year on the contract.

No one else had the stomach for it. They bought the conventional wisdom that pitchers, no matter how young or durable, aren’t worth that kind of risk. History said no, don’t do it.

Mike Hampton looked every bit as durable as Zito, and at least as gifted, when the Rockies gave him an eight-year $121 million deal in 2001. He virtually vanished from the ranks of elite pitchers.

No one, of course, would dare compare the other $100 million deal for a pitcher. Kevin Brown’s seven-year $105 million contract with the Dodgers was a farce because he was 34 in his first season with L.A.

Zito is 28, and Hampton was 29 when he became a Rockie.

More to the point, as the savvy fans relentlessly point out and conventional thinkers just as relentlessly dismiss, Zito has a fluid throwing motion that should keep him healthy for years. Barring a line-drive to his knee, or an injury on the basepaths as he moves to the National League, he should be absolutely fine. (Oh, wait, he has one hit in 29 interleague at-bats. No worries there.)

The biggest concerns about Zito are these:

1) He gives up more fly balls than grounders, and he will face lineups stacked with righthanded hitters, who are likely to pull the ball into left, where the other Barry’s 42-year-old knees will be on duty.

2) He received minimal offensive support last year, but are these Giants likely to give him any more? And the defense absolutely won’t come close to what the A’s provided last year.

3) He matches Matt Morris and immediately has the worst year of his career.

A better bet: Zito gets better each year with the Giants and, along with Matt Cain, gives San Francisco one of the most formidable 1-2 pitching combinations in the game. (That’s assuming that Cain stays healthy; he does not come with the Zito warranty.)

Naysayers say that Zito isn’t the stone-wall ace that deserves the faith the Giants have placed in him, or the greenbacks they’re putting in his bank account. But Billy Beane knows a few things about baseball, and he couldn’t bring himself to part with Zito last season, even though he knew the A’s would lose the lefty to free agency.

I’d like to see Zito become the kind of pitcher who creates a zone around the entire team, making the players around him raise their level of play. With the Giants, that could be pretty heavy lifting.

Bruce Bochy’s job just got a bit easier, though, as he became more than Barry Bonds’ usher into history. The Giants kept saying they tried to bring in expensive superstars to dispel the notion that Bonds would still be the centerpiece of the team, but the net effect — until Thursday — was a club in a holding pattern.

The Zito signing says that 2007 is the start of something for the team, not the protracted last chapter of Bonds’career. The $126 million was a statement to the fans as much as an investment in Zito, and it requires some quiet, nuanced follow-through. In short, the Giants need to upgrade their farm system. This doesn’t take the guts of a seven-year contract to a pitcher. It’s just common sense.

They paid a premium for a well-crafted A’s product. Seven years from now, if the Giants haven’t copied at least a piece of the Oakland manufacturing process, Zito’s successes and failures will be almost irrelevant.